Master (The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A.

Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes.The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past.

Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing.

Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’\u2019s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom.